**1. Introduction**

Our first five years profoundly shape our future life outcomes. Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has the potential to transform children's lives, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The early years are acknowledged as crucial for children's outcomes; the poorest of whom will start school already 11 months behind their more affluent peers. Attendance at high quality early years provision offers a vital opportunity to narrow a gap that will only widen as the school years advance [1]. Education for children in their early years provides significant benefits in determining life chances and increasing social mobility.

Longitudinal studies show that participation in high-quality ECEC programmes has a long-lasting impact on educational outcomes and attainment, as well as on their overall social, emotional, and physical development; and overall well-being. This would imply that society should take greater care of its children because generally what is good for the child is good for society and that extends even further when applied to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. ECEC, described in national policy as childcare is also considered a means of supporting parents' access training, employment and social networks, which in turn improve the quality of their children's lives and reduce the risks of child poverty [2, 3]. These benefits are even stronger for disadvantaged children, and those living in poverty [4, 5]. Studies in the US show that high-quality early learning can be especially beneficial for children with a migrant background, particularly those who speak a minority language at home.

However, investment in early years' education and childcare will only benefit children if the provision is of good quality [6].

Despite the research about the benefits of Early Childhood Education and Care for children, the UK Government has not had a formal strategy since 2007 and relied on the market to provide most early education services. The consequence of the mixed market is that children from disadvantaged backgrounds and communities have seen their access to good quality ECEC limited either because there are fewer settings available, the quality is poor, or the fees are too high [7, 8]. This struck me as very unfair and the reliance on the market to solve the problem of access to high quality services appeared to entrench poverty through the very system. Observing this it seemed absurd to continue with the same approach given the benefits to the whole of society of supporting all children but especially those living in poverty. Left unaddressed, poverty can alter the trajectory of a child's entire life increasing the likelihood of long-term poverty, poor educational outcomes, developing obesity, mental health issues as well as dying early. Poverty is the strongest statistical predictor of how well a child will achieve at school. At the end of primary school, pupils living in poverty are often over nine months behind their peers in reading, writing and math's. For example, in the UK, children with a high persistence of poverty, those children on free school meals for over 80 per cent of their time at school have a learning gap of 22.7 months – twice that of children with a low persistence of poverty (those on free schools' meals for less than 20 per cent of their time at school), who have a learning gap of 11.3 months [9]. If poverty is to be reduced or eliminated, the next generation must be our focus.

Shocked by this, I was determined to show that we could do things differently and I designed the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), to be a social enterprise with a business model that would ensure that children from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds could access high-quality ECEC. The organisation would be shaped by a strong pedagogy with cultural and social capital weaving through its very core. Community engagement would underpin our work and we would provide local employment opportunities, staff and parent training, apprenticeships and local business partnerships in order to drive the widest possible social impact. The organisation would be underpinned by the 3 pillars of sustainability: economic prosperity social equity and environmental integrity economic, social and environmental, also described as the triple bottom line; people, profit and planet and our strategy would be shaped by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the United Nations (2015).

LEYF would offer a high quality, ambitious service using a hybrid business model, blending the power of market exchange with the best of commercial business rigour and efficiency and government innovation to create a business that would be centred by its social purpose to provide the best-in-class nursery provision that could support all children including over one third of the children from disadvantaged backgrounds. I wanted to demonstrate that social and commercial goals could be blended together in the pursuit of a fairer society. Ultimately, I wanted to show that providing high quality nurseries could address one element of the poverty that remained a significant determinant of a child's future.

There was limited research about such a model in childcare but there were discussions about social enterprises in a range of other sectors wishing to provide alternative business models that could drive change, raise the standards of achievement and increase economic sustainability. To be successful, the LEYF model needed to be scalable and replicable so that many more childcare social enterprises could be created

#### *A Childcare Social Enterprise: The London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) Model DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112431*

particularly as in increasingly complex societies social exclusion becomes resistant to simple solutions like fiscal measures and standardised services [10]. It gave me confidence to believe that I could create an independent, sustainable and equitable method of delivering childcare to challenge the existing two-tier system, in essence state or private settings and shine a light on what might be done differently. This was also a decision taken at a time where children from poor backgrounds tended to be in the depleting number of state-funded or voluntary-run subsidised services, while there was a corresponding increase in private nurseries, often funded through private equity and investment and situated in affluent areas using higher fees to fund the investment. When I began, the system seemed intractable but social entrepreneurs share the view that most problems can be reshaped into a model for change through the hard work needed to confront the societal structures that leave too many behind [11].

Fifteen years on, the task of creating an independent and sustainable socialenterprise childcare model should not be underestimated but given the unfairness of the situation facing so many children, I was inspired by the words of the social entrepreneur Mohamed Yunus who reminded us that indifference is the enemy and if it matters to you then do something about it or as President Obama said in his campaign speeches in 2010, if not now, when [12].

## **2. Challenges getting established**

Building a social enterprise begins with the governance structure which includes leadership. This can be difficult as there is no legal definition of a social enterprise in the UK. Businesses and organisations which describe themselves as such all operate under the 'third sector', an umbrella term which refers, but not exclusively, to charities, Community Interest Companies (CIC), cooperatives and mutuals, fair-trade organisations and social firms. The Department of Trade and Industry describes social enterprises as a business with primarily social objectives where surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners. The membership organisation for social enterprises in the UK describes social enterprises as businesses which trade for a social or environmental purpose. There are more than 100,000 social enterprises in the UK, contributing £60 billion to the economy and employing around two million people. Social enterprises demonstrate a better way to do business, one that prioritises benefit to people and planet and use the majority of any profit to further their mission. Social enterprises contribute to reducing economic inequality, improving social justice and to environmental sustainability. After some discussion at LEYF we chose to retain our charitable status so we could use our Articles of Association or the rules of the LEYF charity as an asset lock. That meant we would be more assured that whatever we decided to do would be aligned to the rules of our charity and support the aims and purpose of the organisation which were to provide high quality nurseries, support staff with training and development and campaign for the rights of children and their families.

We rebranded as LEYF and started to operate as a social enterprise and put together an incremental plan to develop a sustainable and independent business by providing nurseries across London, selling places directly to parents, businesses, local authorities and other organisations using a cross-subsidy fee strategy which would allow us to support up to 35 per cent of children from disadvantaged families to attend the nurseries. I was keen we did not develop a traditional fundraising charity

approach but make sure the offer to the children was built into the very business model we designed.

Choosing where to site nurseries was an important factor. Most nurseries would be situated in neighbourhoods where families from both professional backgrounds and more disadvantaged backgrounds lived, so the children could be educated together in order to build trust and social capital and reduce social segregation. Several studies find desegregation to have a positive effect on outcomes of marginalised students, including pre-school age children. Studies point to several mechanisms which could evidence the relationship between social mixing in schools and attainment, including improved quality of teaching, exposure to diverse peer groups, positive peer effects, and raise expectations in home learning environments [13, 14]. However, we would also run nurseries in areas of high deprivation, as these were often forlorn neighbourhoods, characterised by high levels of economic exclusion without nurseries or where the quality of the nurseries was poor. These were areas where we noticed families were struggling with adverse childhood experiences and the resultant intergenerational outcomes of what is often called the toxic trio; mental health issues, substance abuse and domestic abuse, compromising a child's chance to thrive. Today, up to 77% of the LEYF nurseries are situated in these areas because every child matters and has the right benefit from the economic wellbeing that a nursery will bring into a neighbourhood through the direct provision of ECEC but also the additional economic contribution through employment and local spending [15, 16].
